Friend and Faux
by shoefiend
Summary: Carrie and Charlotte face people from their pasts.
1. Chapter 1

**Friend or Faux**

Harry Goldenblatt sat at the small table kitchen encouraging his small daughter to eat her cereal. After Mai's bowl was empty, he turned his attention to his newspaper. A story on the front page caught his attention. "I'll be damned," he said quietly. "Charlotte," he bellowed. "You're going to want to see this."

Charlotte stormed into the kitchen buttoning the jacket of her Chanel suit as she entered. " What is it?, " her haste making her impatient. " If I don't leave this apartment right this second, I am going to be late for children's' hospital board meeting. I hear enough snide remarks from Bunny McDougal. I don't want to give her an excuse to make any more."

"I don't think that's going to be a problem," he said, handing Charlotte the paper. She saw the headline, "Society Matron Crushed by Hothouse."

A couple of hours later, Carrie Bradshaw opened her eyes and groaned. This was far from the worst hangover she had experienced; but it was the first she had encounter she had had in a long time with a throbbing head and cottonmouth and she felt fairly wretched. She reached out toward the nightstand and slapped at the swag bag from last evening's club opening until it fell out of her way. The alarm clock said five minutes after ten.

She groaned again and forced herself to sit and them fumbled around for the remote. "Good Company," her favorite morning talk show had just started and she didn't want to miss the daily "America's talking about…" segment. As the television clicked on, Liz Valdez, one of the shows hosts was holding a magazine in one hand and waving it in the air. "America's talking about an article in this month's Men's World magazine by a writer named Jack Berger." Carrie's stomach flipped violently.

"That's right," another host chimed in. "He writes about how all women today are mounting an all assault on all things male. He writes about a woman he went out with – he calls her Christie Bradmoor – flaunted her success in front of his face and how emasculating that was to him. And how he felt like he was going to grow a … Let's just he thought he was going to grow a vajayjay when she forced him to wear a red, silk Prada shirt."

"I saw, let a man be man," a man in the audience yelled.

Carrie hit the "off" button on the remote.


	2. Chapter 2

That evening, Carrie could restrain herself no longer. She had to know what Berger was written about their relationship -- about her -- in that magazine article. After having a quick sub at the sandwich shop down the street, she headed into Planet Livre bookstore and headed straight for the magazine racks. She located Men's World , opened the magazine to the table of contents. There is was: _Real Men Don't Wear Prada_, by Jack Berger. She flipped to the article. Her eyes fell to a paragraph in the middle of the page.

_Christie, so proud of her newfound success. It felt as if she was always finding little ways of reminding me she was a successful writer with a book on best-seller list, and I was not. The worst moment for me was when she drug me by the ring in my nose down Madison Avenue to the Prada boutique. Prada! She insisted on buying me a bright, red silk shirt. What man wears a silk Prada shirt? I was afraid I was going to grow a uterus._

She turned the page.

_I told Christie that I didn't want to be that guy, the kind of man threatened by his woman's success. I don't know if she believed me or not. I am not sure I even believed it. I just wanted out of there._

In the last page of the article, Berger wrote that, once he and "Christie" broke up, he got his groove back, that he was able to write again. There was no mention that he had broken up with her via Post-It note, that he hadn't been man enough to dump her in person. In the last sentence, he said that he tore the Prada shirt "Christie" had bought him into rags and used it to wash his motorcycle.

Saturday morning, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte met at their favorite café for their usual Saturday brunch. This day, the their conversation was focused on an article from yesterday's newspaper.

_Margaret Hayes "Bunny" MacDougal, one of the grande dames of New York society was killed at her estate Thursday afternoon in a freak accident. Mrs. MacDougal was supervising the removal of small gardening shed that she had used to cultivate her prize-winning roses. The chains being used to lift building suddenly broke and it tumbled to the ground, crushing her to death. _

_Mrs. MacDougal was a leading philanthropist. For many years she was the head of the MacDougal Charitable Foundation as well as being Chairperson of the Board of the Children's Hospital charity.  
_

"Crushed to death by her own garden shed. How very 'Wizard of Oz," Carrie joked.

"It's not funny," Charlotte said, slightly appalled. "I talked to poor Trey last night. He's beside himself."

"Wasn't this the same woman who helped ruined your first marriage and then tried to make sure you didn't get anything in the divorce?" Miranda asked.

"Yes, but she was also the chairperson of the children's hospital charity board for eighteen years. She did a lot of good work for sick children. She deserves credit for that. I feel bad. I mean it. She wasn't my favorite person. But when I talked to Trey yesterday, he was saying that he brother and sister-in-law couldn't be bothered to fly back from St. Barts."

Charlotte finished the last of her egg white omelet and put her napkin on the plate. "We had an emergency board meeting yesterday afternoon at the hospital. I am the new chairperson. I have to get some plans together. I have to go to the caterers and choose the hors d'oeuvres for the gathering after the memorial service and then go to the florist and buy the wreath from the board members and them make sure they all sign the sympathy card. "

With that Charlotte left her chair, picked up her jacket, said her "good-byes" and left. She didn't notice the bemused looks on the faces of her friends

"Well, Charlotte is the Martha Stewart of death," Carrie said.

Suddenly Carrie felt petty. Just a few hours, she had been ready to take out a hit on Berger and here Charlotte was planning a memorial for a woman who had never been anything but mean to her.


	3. Chapter 3

Honoria Grosbourne said, "Charlotte, you've done such a wonderful job organizing this reception for Bunny. We have given the old girl a proper send-off."

The older woman draped her arm over Charlotte's shoulder and led her off to a corner of the room. "Don't get me wrong. I considered Bunny a good friend. I knew her for over forty years and I considered her a good friend. I can't even begin to imagine how many hours the two of us spent serving on various boards. But, oh, she could be a mean one."

"And you have gift for staggering understatement," Charlotte thought. Instead she just nodded her agreement.

"I can't begin to tell you, Charlotte, how much pleasure it gave me to see you take on Bunny and beat her at her own game. Very few people got the best of Bunny MacDougal. Not everyone she crossed paths with faired so well. I couldn't help but notice you and Trey having a good long talk. Is he going to be okay?"

Charlotte knew that she would always be fond of Trey. Charlotte thought of the hateful woman who had so dominated him. Trey was sad now, but without Bunny's constant interference, his life would be so much better. Charlotte said, "Trey will be more than fine."

Carrie's closet in the new apartment she shared with Big was cavernous. It was easily her favorite feature of the place. This evening, she was down on her hands and knees in that closet, clad only in her nightgown, looking though boxes of miscellaneous junk that she had moved from her old apartment. She was a woman on a mission. She had to find Berger's phone number.

"So there you are. I thought I was going to have to send out a search party." Big's voice startled Carrie.

She had been trying to reach Berger for over a week. He had moved, and she didn't know his new address. His phone number was unlisted. She had to find that small scrap of paper on which he had written it down his cell phone number for her. She knew she still had it somewhere. Maybe trapped between the pages of the black Kate Spade organizer where she kept phone numbers and email addresses. Maybe it was in the box that held the contents of her desk. She didn't know.

When Carrie explained her mission to Big, he smiled and said, "What are you going to do, hunt him down, pin him down on the ground and not let him up until he apologizes? Carrie, he doesn't want to see you. Look, if Hot Dog had any cajones, he would have come to you in person like a man. He's a loser."

Carrie had heard Samantha and Miranda say the same thing over the last week. Carrie had not paid much attention to them. After all, they were her unconditionally–supportive friends. That's what they would have to say. Somehow, coming from a man, it sounded different.

A couple of days later, Charlotte received a visit from a representative of the MacDougal Charitable Trust. Trey had suggested her as the interim supervisor of the Trust. The job was temporary, the man explained, just six months or a year until a permanent supervisor could be found.

Charlotte turned down the job immediately. She was busy enough with the charity work she was already doing, not to mention raising a daughter and being the wife that Harry deserved. And, truthfully, an even deeper reason was that she her divorce from Trey was the unhappiest time in her life and Bunny had made the experience just as awful as she could. She didn't want to be dragged back into any affiliation with the MacDougals. She had a new life now. She has been more happy over the last year than she ever knew was possible.

And besides, she told herself, that very day Harry was going to get in touch with an adoption attorney referred to him by a colleague. Hopefully, they were going to have a new baby in the house soon.


	4. Chapter 4

Perhaps it was because she found herself with some free time that morning, or maybe it was eagerness to bring a new child into her home, but Charlotte found herself arriving at the offices of adoption attorney over half an-hour early. She settled down in a chair and the reception area and let her mind wander. She thought about the events of the last few weeks, and about Trey's request.

"Aren't you a pretty one," the woman cooed as she peered into Mai's carriage.

Charlotte was startled into attention. She hadn't even noticed the woman who had sat beside her.

She turned to address Charlotte. "She's such a pretty little girl. How old is she?"

"She just turned two a few weeks ago," Charlotte replied absently.

"Oh, how lucky you are. My Jim and I have been trying to have a baby since we got married nearly ten years ago. When we found out we couldn't have our own, we got on all the lists. That was a little over five years ago now."

Suddenly Charlotte felt her heart go out to the woman. "That must be agony," she sympathized.

"Well, yeah, it was. But we have our baby now, thanks to lawyer Stone. He'll be born at the end of this month, right in Queens, not a mile from where we live."

As out of character as it was for her to share personal information with a stranger, Charlotte felt the need to share a bit of her own story with the woman. "We adopted Mai from China about a year ago. She's been such a joy."

"We wanted to do an overseas adoption. We just couldn't afford it. It's bad enough all the fees to adopt an American baby. We just couldn't afford to travel to a foreign country and back several times and have a lawyer to fill out all the extra paper work. We had to take money from Jim's parents as it is. It just seems wrong, if you ask me, children in those orphanages without anyone to pay any attention to them, when there are couples like Jim and me who could give them a good home here."

Carrie found slip of paper with Berger's number on it. And she decided to take the best revenge – living happily. She went out onto the balcony of her new home. She took the piece of paper, tore it into eight little pieces and let a breeze blow them from her hand.

That evening, Charlotte was thinking about Mai, about how sweet the little girl was, how much joy she had brought into her life and Harry's. She also though about Bunny MacDougal's hateful attitude when Charlotte had wanted to adopt a baby with Trey. She sang Mai a lullaby and put her to bed. Then she went into the living room and dialed Trey's number.

Six months later, Charlotte cut the ribbon for the Margaret Hayes MacDougal Center for International Adoption, a charity underwritten by the MacDougal Charitable Foundation to help couples defray the cost of adoptions. She smile and thought, "It's never too late to do the right thing. Even when you're dead."


End file.
